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The Harvard Medical School Center for Global Health Delivery&ndash:Dubai, in collaboration with Roxana Rustomjee and Sudha Srinivasan from the Division of AIDS, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and National Institutes of Health, organized a scientific meeting on tuberculosis (TB) infection in Dubai. This workshop brought together one-hundred researchers, practitioners, and leaders in TB care and prevention from across the globe to discuss a framework for eradicating TB.
Despite the existence of drugs for its cure and prevention, TB remains a major public health concern globally. TB continues to infect millions of patients worldwide, leading to disease, disability, impoverishment, and disempowerment. Recently, it has been acknowledged that eliminating TB will require the active treatment of TB infection, as it reduces the risk of progression to disease, thereby decreasing the transmission of TB to others.
The workshop in Dubai was convened for researchers and practitioners working in different areas of tuberculosis to share experiences and expertise in order to identify research gaps in order to develop strategies to eradicate TB. The workshop spanned basic science to applied sciences and began with presenters discussing the spectrum of TB infection and disease and sharing knowledge of innovative diagnostics for TB infection. Presenters discussed opportunities and challenges for new treatments of TB infection, as well as methods to predict who will progress to TB disease and determine who to treat. Experts in pediatric TB stated challenges and developments in the diagnosis and treatment of TB infection in children. A special session focused on the development of long-acting treatment formulation as an innovative approach to drug development for TB.
The goals of this meeting included sharing expertise and experience that will encourage and inform research and development to promote the scale-up of screening, diagnosis, and treatment of TB infection and ultimately lead to the eradication of this disease. The stimulating presentations and valuable discussions that arose from this meeting will inform the future directions of research in the field of TB infection to accelerate the elimination of TB.
Number of Participants: 94
Number of Countries: 19
Countries Represented: Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, France, India, Kenya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Peru, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, Uganda, United Kingdom, United States of America, and Vietnam